We’ve compiled a “best of the best” of Cosmopolis coverage in Toronto. There are video and print interviews with Robert Pattinson, David Cronenberg, Kevin Durand and Paul Giamatti. If you missed it, be sure to check out Toronto Standard’s fantastic interview with Sarah Gadon HERE.

Jay Baruchel didn’t need to be asked twice about appearing in David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis.

The Montreal actor was in New York City last year with his fiance, actress Alison Pill, when he got the call from his manager with the offer to act in Cosmopolis.

“I got a call saying – ‘There’s two days (of shooting) on the new David Cronenberg movie, would you want to…..’ and I just cut off my manager and said – ‘Yup’,” said Baruchel. “And he was like – ‘O.K. let me just send you the script and see if it’s something you want to do.’ And I cut him off again. I said – ‘I don’t care. I don’t care what I’ll be doing.’ The fact of the matter is that the man, Mr. Cronenberg, is one of my heroes. One of my idols. My inspiration. I’ve dreamt of the chance of getting to meet him and pick his brain, let alone act for him. So it was a no-brainer for me.

“And it was a predictably unique experience. He’s super disarming and quite a smiley guy. He’s laidback. He’s similar to (Clint) Eastwood” – who directed Baruchel in Million Dollar Baby – “in the sense that he gives a minimal amount of direction. The rehearsal is the direction. Then he tells you where to sit and when you gotta do what you gotta do. It was awesome. Then the rest of the time I was just weirding him out by asking about Videodrome. The film nerd in me couldn’t help himself.

But, I had to ask, was Cronenberg happy to talk about Videodrome or was it more like ‘Oh my God, I can’t even remember?’

**

Baruchel appears in the very first scene of Cosmopolis, which opens in Montreal Friday. Twilight star Robert Pattinson plays Eric Packer, a 28-year-old Wall Street mogul in his limo heading across Manhattan to get a haircut, amidst a city paralyzed by a presidential visit and anti-capitalism riots. He meets a succession of characters over the course of this voyage, folks played by Juliette Binoche, Sarah Gadon, Mathieu Amalric, Emily Hampshire, and Paul Giamatti. The first person he meets is a jumpy tech specialist who chats with him in the back of limo and that nerdy guy is played by Baruchel.

“It was a trip man,” said Baruchel. “On every possible level, it was an amazing two days of work. I was getting to work with my hero and getting to contribute to Canadian film. It was also fun to do something so weird. 90-percent of the time you’re doing stuff where you’re falling on banana peels. So it’s neat to spend two days in a limo doing an ethereal monologue.”

Robert Pattinson wasn’t expecting to star in Cosmopolis. In point of fact, he didn’t think a director like David Cronenberg would even consider him for the project.

“I never really took myself seriously as an actor before,” he says, barely awake the morning after the movie’s gala Toronto premiere. “And [then] you get cast in a movie like this, and it gets to Cannes and it’s not a total disaster, and I haven’t brought down David’s entire career…”
Cronenberg’s eyes crinkle. “We’ll see,” the director says. “That’s still in the future.”

On the verge of burning out after shooting the two-part Twilight finale, Breaking Dawn, Pattinson had been thinking seriously about pulling back from movies.

“I was fully intending on hiding for a couple of years,” Pattinson says.

“I only wanted to do small parts. The time is gone – for me, especially – when you could learn on the job. I mean, even the idea of going to a repertory company or something – everybody’s going to be filming it on their phone, and it’s exactly the same thing in movies pretty much. So I wanted to try to do small parts in movies I thought I could learn something from. But then this came up.”

“This” was the role of Eric Packer, a billionaire financial wizard who experiences a professional and personal collapse over one very long car ride across Manhattan in Cronenberg’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s allegorical novel. The way Cronenberg structured the movie – shooting in sequence, often sealing Pattinson and his co-stars into a limousine and directing them remotely – pushed Pattinson to a kind of creative epiphany.

“It takes away a lot of the problems of self-consciousness,” he says. “I did a movie where a lot of it was underwater” (that’d be Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire, which put him on the map as doomed golden boy Cedric Diggory), “and it kind of felt a little bit like that. You feel like you have very little to prove when you’re in such a tiny space. There’s very little of the outside world coming in, so it’s pretty simple.”

Cronenberg so enjoyed putting Pattinson through Packer’s paces that he’s eager to repeat the experience, possibly with another member of his repertory company.

“You meet people that you work with and you feel you’d really like to work with them again,” he says. “I felt that way about Rob, and I felt that way, obviously, about Viggo [Mortensen]. And then I started to think, ‘Wow, Rob and Viggo in the same movie would be terrific,’ because I know they’d get along, but I also think creatively, onscreen, it’d be fantastic. But I don’t have a project, exactly; we have some possibilities. So we’re talking about it. It’s possible it’ll never happen, because it’s just so hard to get things made, really – especially anything interesting. That’s sort of where I am, making movies that are hard to get made.”

In all seriousness, though, the two do expect to collaborate on another picture.

“We feel that fate will bring us together again,” says Cronenberg.

“I’m setting up a PayPal account,” Pattinson laughs.

“Yes, that’s right,” Cronenberg says. “We’re crowdsourcing. Please, if you’ve got any money on you right now, just put it on the table.”

TORONTO — Celebrated Canadian director David Cronenberg and Twilight star Robert Pattinson are hardly anti-establishment radicals.
But you would never know it from their film collaboration, Cosmopolis, which opens in theatres across Canada June 8.
Cosmopolis has already had its splashy premiere at the recent Cannes Film Festival, but the Toronto-based Cronenberg and the London-raised Pattinson are happy to be back in the city where they shot the film just last year.
Looking casual in slacks and shirts at a downtown Toronto hotel, the dapper filmmaker and handsome baseball cap-wearing leading man are making themselves available to promote the film, which exposes modern-day obsessions with greed and power.
But Cronenberg said that Cosmopolis is less an excuse for socio-political diatribes and more about an opportunity to present a fresh story. And yes, the 69-year-old understands that the film hits screens as anti-capitalist protests abound worldwide.
The movie, based on the 2003 Don DeLillo novel, tracks the bizarre day in the life of young Manhattan billionaire investor Eric Packer (Pattinson)

One more great print article from the Globe and Mail HERE with David Cronenberg and Robert Pattinson talking about the financial side of filmmaking.

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